Amazon's entry into the growing tablet sector has been one
of the worst
kept secrets in the tablet industry. Amazon has already stormed the
e-reader market with its line of Kindle
devices, so delivering the company's expansive multimedia platform to a
more versatile platform seemed like a given.

To reach that price point, the Kindle Fire forgoes 3G
access, a microphone, and the usual bevy of cameras that come on
today's tablets. However, the Kindle Fire does include Wi-Fi (802.11n) and a free 30-day
trial of Amazon Prime (an Amazon Prime membership normally runs $79/year).

The Kindle Fire weighs 14.6 ounces and features a dual-core processor. Amazon says that the Kindle Fire provides up to 8 hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video playback (Wi-Fi disabled). The devices fully recharges within 4 hours via its USB 2.0 port.

While the Kindle Fire has 8GB of internal storage, apps from the Amazon Appstore, music, magazines, and Kindle Books will all be stored on Amazon's Cloud Drive service which makes having a large amount of onboard storage unnecessary.

"Kindle Fire brings together all of the things we've been working on at Amazon for over 15 years into a single, fully-integrated service for customers," said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. "With Kindle Fire, you have instant access to all the content, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, the convenience of Amazon Whispersync, our revolutionary cloud-accelerated web browser, the speed and power of a state-of-the-art dual-core processor, a vibrant touch display with 16 million colors in high resolution, and a light 14.6 ounce design that's easy to hold with one hand - all for only $199. We're offering premium products, and we're doing it at non-premium prices."

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95% of what people need in a tablet is a decent web browser with flash, an e-mail client, a way to see their pictures and video. The Touchpad has all that plus a webcam and a microphone to use Skype with...At the price of a dumb picture frame, you can't go wrong with it...

Besides, oversleeping is no excuse, I got mine directly by retrying 100+ times on the HP SMB store online without leaving home, on Saturday :) Had to wait a month for them, but that's OK.

The chunkiness is fixed by turning off most of the logging by the way. Also, Android 2.3 is already ported to it, but I'm waiting for Android 3.5 before I consider flashing. WebOS is very sufficient for all the tasks I expect from a Tablet, one being web browsing with FLASH, which a certain $500+ tablet can't do.

Flash is a dead end on mobile devices. Have you used it on an Android tablet? Slow, choppy, is mainly used for ads, and most of the time the interfaces don't work properly because they rely on mouseover.

The fact that most video sites support HTML5 on mobile devices makes it a moot point. The fact that I can watch live Starcraft 2 streaming on JustinTV, TwitchTV, or games on sites like BlipTV, is kind of the nail in the coffin for me. It just isn't necessary as non-Flash video is a reality now, everybody does it.

If you absolutely need to browse most restaurant websites though, then you'll want Flash. For some reason they are the only holdouts, weird.

It honestly isn't necessary on mobile devices anymore. Non-Flash video is everywhere now, even for things like live streaming. Millions of people use HTML5 video on mobile devices every day (not just on iOS), and this is only getting started.

The thing is that Flash and other third party plug-ins are a solution to problems that don't really exist anymore. The writing is on the wall, even look at Windows 8 which has depreciated Flash for HTML5 in the Metro tile layout.

Nothing crashes my browsers in Windows 7 as much as Flash, nor is anything else as big a security vector as Flash or Reader. It'll be around for a while, but I certainly won't miss it when its gone. Fortunately there are an abundance of alternative on mobile devices.

I don't know what cheap $99 Android tablet you bought, but on my Galaxy Tab Flash works just great. It's not slow or choppy. But Galaxy Tab aside, Flash also works great on my Samsung Infuse with is far inferior CPU and smaller screen. I couldn't be happier. iOS not supporting Flash is what kept me away from iPhone, and iPad for the last two years or so.